Archive for December, 2004

Unit testing Windows Forms controls & data binding

A quick tip from recent experience: If you're writing your own Windows Forms controls and trying to unit test them, data binding issues are likely to pop up at some point. When you put the controls on the form, data binding works like magic. But when you're instantiating the controls outside the form context, you […]

December 31, 2004 · Jouni Heikniemi · 2 Comments
Posted in: .NET

Code quality, part I: Why ArrayLists are a bad interface

I'll start my planned series of code quality related posts with a .NET specific issue. I was planning on a more generic rant for a starter, but I've decided to try to blog things as they cross my mind – otherwise my list of topics will just keep growing (it's about three pages on 10-point […]

December 29, 2004 · Jouni Heikniemi · Comments Closed
Posted in: .NET

JHLib 1.1

I've just pushed out JHLib 1.1, a new version of my tool library. The most relevant addition is the support for a Csv writer, but included is also the custom separator fix for the Csv reader requested by so many readers. There's also a class for easier number -> hex string conversions. I've also added […]

December 26, 2004 · Jouni Heikniemi · No Comments
Posted in: .NET

Seriously hitting the Whidbey wave

Regarding some of my promises before Christmas, I've now hit number 2 – my Whidbey installation with VS.NET 2005 and Yukon betas is up. Not completely, but sufficiently to allow me to do whatever I wish to test at this point. Feels good to have everything back up – I accidentally disintegrated my Whidbey about […]

December 25, 2004 · Jouni Heikniemi · No Comments
Posted in: .NET

Quality in open source and commercial apps, my take

Lately, I've read several interesting blog posts and news articles on the differences between open source and traditional closed-source commercial software. To mention three firestarters, here are some articles that led to me posting this: The Luxury of Ignorance by Eric S. Raymond, Judging the quality of open source projects by Ron Jacobs and now […]

December 23, 2004 · Jouni Heikniemi · 3 Comments
Posted in: General

The social touch

Larry Osterman's recent blog entry gathered stories about a passed-away core Windows Multimedia developer, Syon Bhattacharya. I had never even heard about Syon before Larry's post, yet the memories and stories collected managed to impress me. My condolences to everybody who actually knew him. But allow me to publicly iterate some thoughts raised by Larry's […]

December 19, 2004 · Jouni Heikniemi · No Comments
Posted in: General

So what's up?

A two week period of silence has passed since my last posting. So what has happened? Well, I could say both "a lot" and "very little". Very little in the sense that I really haven't had much time for discovering new things, twiddling with new gadgets, creating new software – or even the blog world. […]

December 14, 2004 · Jouni Heikniemi · Comments Closed
Posted in: General